Goat cheese is one of those comforting foods that always hits the spot with me. I like it anytime as an appetizer, either plain with crackers, or with a topping of chutney or some fruit thing. And one of my favorite things to order in restaurants is any green salad with coins of chèvre. My all-time favorite use of chèvre is when the goat cheese coins have been covered in some chopped nuts and warmed before being put on a salad. I have a goat cheese cookbook; although I must sheepishly admit I’ve never made anything in it.

So anytime I see goat cheese or chèvre anywhere, I usually look more closely at said recipe or menu. This time it was in Food and Wine magazine, May of 2006. More sheepish looks here, but I just got around to reading it. I took a trip to France in May of ’06 and there were a bunch of my magazines that didn’t get read for about 2 months before and at least several months after. My DH had major surgery just a month later, so I lost many months of recipe clipping. I’ve been making a diligent effort lately to get a few stacks of magazines read and tossed out.

When I was planning a large dinner party for this last week, I knew I wanted to make salmon, so worked on rounding out the menu. This clipping spoke to me more than others. And the recipe itself is really quite different. In the explanation about it the article described the dressing as similar to ranch, but goat cheese instead. I wouldn’t have described it anywhere close to ranch except in color and opaqueness. It’s much thicker than ranch dressing and has a totally different taste and texture.

The room temp cheese is mixed by hand with some garlic, salt, white wine vinegar, a splash of water even, then some olive oil and walnut oil. Oh yes, and some fresh, chopped thyme. The salad is composed of light lettuces (they called for Belgian endive, frisee and arugula). Visiting 3 local grocery chains produced no frisée, except a few sprigs in a lettuce combo package. So I used arugula, both regular and red Belgian endive plus the combo lettuces. The salad is also dressed with some sliced apple and toasted walnuts.

I liked it a lot, actually. Our guests didn’t take much per serving, so we had leftovers, and they tasted pretty good the 2nd day (normally I toss out salads that have been dressed since I don’t like soggy salad) but for whatever reason, this didn’t soggify much. (You like that new word, soggify?)

Maybe you’ll have better luck finding frisee, but if not, just use whatever light lettuces you can find.
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I seem to be on a run lately with rice and pilafs. Sometimes I go for months, literally, without eating a grain of rice. I’ve had it several times in the last 30 days. A few weeks ago I made a real oldie, an Armenian Rice and Pasta Pilaf similar to Rice-a-Roni. It was scrumptious. Then, just for fun I made the real packaged Rice-a-Roni. Oh, it was icky. My DH is so spoiled – he ate one bite and left the rest. The leftovers were tossed in the garbage. That’ll teach me to try to cut corners.

For this side dish I wanted something lighter – pilaf can become a major component of the meal, and I didn’t want the rice to stand out. But just plain boiled rice is way too boring for me. I turned to my favorite chef, Phillis Carey, and her book, The Casual Gourmet Presents Fast and Fabulous Entertaining Menus and found this lemony rice that fit the bill entirely.

Salmon was on the menu, and it has a lovely sauce on the side, so wanted rice to complement it. This side is flavored with onion, saffron, lemon zest and just a bit of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. Since I was making a huge portion to feed 12 (actually I think I had enough to feed about 20 since no one took very large portions), I gathered up all the ingredients ahead of time – I did a mis en place – the tray to “put in place” or “everything in place” for this. The onion was chopped in a bowl, lemon zested in a covered little bowl, salt and pepper measured, saffron also in its own tiny bowl, the quart container of chicken broth, the rice measured and sitting in a bowl and the timer all set to the minutes needed, just waiting for me to tap the top to start the clock ticking. All these items were on a tray beside the range, ready to go. That’s the mis en place. The pan was already on the range with the measured butter in it. So, when our guests arrived I was able to quickly make this and set the timer – without having to refer to the recipe time and again.

It was easy to do – sauté the onion, then add the rice and sauté that briefly. Then you add the broth, saffron, (and I added a jot of lemon juice), seasonings and you simmer it covered for a short time until just barely tender. Toss with the lemon zest, cheese and garnish with Italian parsley. Done.
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Without much of any equivocation, I can say that asparagus is one of my favorite vegetables. I like it  just about any way it comes – even raw – but the best prep for me is oven roasted. So when I was reading a posting over at A Year from Oak Cottage, a blog I read regularly, and Marie talked about preparing her crumbled asparagus, I perked up, printed out the recipe, and tried it.

The greatest of superlatives are needed here. Fabulous. Delicious. Moist. Pretty. Perfect. All those things. I made these for a dinner party last night, and I’d say the winning recipes of the evening were the dessert (yes, I’ll post it in a few days) and this asparagus. I made two pounds of asparagus, and there are maybe 4 spears left. Of course, I was serving 12 people, but everybody loved these, with me included.

Yes, I’ll be making these again. And again. They’re that good. I did change the recipe just a little bit – only the proportions – because I ended up with too much mayo left over, but this isn’t one of those exact kinds of recipes anyway. If you want to use less mayo altogether, as long as you rub each spear with enough mayo so the crumb mixture will stick, do so. Nobody will know it’s rubbed with mayo – it isn’t visible. Maybe you could coat the spears with olive oil and it would work too. You dip the spears in the mayo (rubbing it on with your fingers worked best), then my DH helped by rolling the spears in the panko crumb-cheese mixture. It does help to have two sets of hands since you muck up your fingers in the mayo and further muck them up if you go back and forth to the crumbs.

So, I suggest you get yourself to your local farm stand or market and make these right away quick. Asparagus season is almost over, and I’ll be making these again soon. Buy plenty because you’ll eat more of these than you anticipate!
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My history with trout goes way back. I believe I told the story here before that when I was young (between about age 5-12) my family always went tent camping for our annual summer vacation. We camped in the California Sierras – Virginia Lakes, sometimes on the Sonora (west) side, but most often on the eastern side in a variety of campgrounds. My dad made plans a year ahead as to which campground we’d go to. My mom planned for weeks ahead, thinking about what meals she’d prepare on the kerosene camp stove (two burners) usually three meals a day. Because there wasn’t much to do there, food played a vital role in the entertainment. But for many, many meals we ate the trout my dad (and sometimes my mother or I) caught in the rivers and lakes.

My mom had only one way she prepared the trout – dipped whole (tail and head intact, including the eyes of course, which for me was a big yuk factor) in egg, cornmeal and pan fried in bacon grease (leftover from the bacon and egg breakfasts we ate every morning in the chilly filtered light coming through the pine trees, with a stream gurgling nearby – the stream lulled me to sleep every night, and I’ve never forgotten that sound).

But, we ate trout. And more trout. And more trout. So much trout that after about 3 days of it I couldn’t eat another bite. My mother either. Even my dad tired of eating trout. We even had to eat it for breakfast some mornings. More yuk. But what I disliked the most were the bones. And I’ve never wavered in my aversion to fish bones. I never, ever order fish at a restaurant unless it’s a boneless fillet. And usually I’ll discuss the bones with the waiter/waitress to make sure somebody has paid close attention to the removal of them.

Yet I do enjoy the flavor – the delicate flavor – of trout. So, the other evening we had dinner at a restaurant some miles from our home, and the waitress happened to mention that her son often catches fresh trout near Mammoth Lakes and brings them home to her. But she doesn’t like trout. Won’t eat it. Would we like some, she asked? Free. She wanted to get it out of her freezer. Sure, we said. My DH met her at the restaurant the next day and she happily handed him two freezer bags of trout fillets. I did have to use needle-nosed pliers to remove about another 40-50 pin bones from the 5-7 fillets in the first bag. Even one of those would have ruined the dinner for me.

Because this trout was already filleted, I couldn’t have prepared it in my mother’s tried and true method. So I baked the slim fillets with a mayo based topping. It took but a few minutes to cook them through. The resulting fish was tender and moist from the topping. And the flavor was mostly hidden, actually, from the strong flavors of capers and the Pecorino cheese. I might have liked to taste more of the fish, so if you prefer the fish flavor I’d recommend you eliminate the capers and use a milder cheese. In any case, the preparation takes little time and the mayo sauce is quite forgiving if you lack one thing or another in the recipe. This isn’t a wow recipe. My DH didn’t care for it much, but he thought it was the fish, not the preparation. But I had not one single bone!
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It was one of those days. It had been a stressful day (because of some major work we’re having done around our yard). I recognized that I was very unsettled and needed something to soothe the “ravage beast” in myself. What better to do than make cookies? It made sense to me. We’ve been out of cookies in the freezer for awhile, and I had another one of Donna Deane’s recipes from the Los Angeles Times to try. She’s the Food Editor at the paper, and she wrote up an article the first week of January, about refrigerator cookies. I made one already – the Coffee Walnut Cookies – that were just wonderful.

Making the batter is cinchy easy. The usual stuff: butter, sugar, vanilla, flour, leavening. This one also had chunky peanut butter and chopped bittersweet chocolate. Roll the batter into logs, chill overnight and bake. I didn’t have any peanuts in my larder, so used walnuts instead.

The result: very good. The peanut butter taste does not predominate, which is interesting. This is basically a chocolate chip cookie with a peanut butter undertone, made into a refrigerator cookie for easy slicing. The cookies contain a lot of nuts by proportion – just make sure you chop both nuts and chocolate into pretty small pieces – otherwise when you try to slice these you’ll be doing “chopping” as you slice, which breaks up the dough. Now, it’s possible that if I’d had peanuts on hand, maybe the peanutty taste would be stronger. But I liked the walnuts actually.
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Over the years since the tri-tip roast became more visible at the butcher shop (or at Costco), I’d not been bitten by the bug. Lots of people raved about it. I wasn’t convinced. Yes, I had some here and there when someone else made it. After all, it looks like a fillet mignon. It just doesn’t taste like one, and it certainly doesn’t chew like one. But I read an article recently for tri-tip, extolling its virtues. So, when I visited my local, favorite butcher and they had Niman Ranch tri-tips, rib eyes and porterhouses, I figured if Niman Ranch was producing them, and if my butcher was showcasing the tri-tips with its very uptown relatives, then maybe they were worth reconsidering.

If you’ve never been much of a tri-tip fan, I won’t be convincing you otherwise. I don’t really think I am, either. This recipe doesn’t make tri-tip taste or chew any better than a fairly chewy piece of meat. But if you enjoy a bit of chew, this preparation may be just down your alley.

Tri-tip is a cut of meat that comes from the bottom sirloin. If you’ve ever had a sirloin from the bottom end and noticed that it was a lot more chewy and less tender, well, this is cut from that end. There are only two of them on every animal, so that’s why we don’t see them all that often. They’re very lean, I’ll give them that. Although there are some sinews and a bit of gristle, there’s really very little. So, if you’re going to eat red meat, this is fairly healthy. It needs marinating to give it more flavor, and to tenderize it. At least 24 hours worth.

The recipe comes from Bon Appetit, June, 2002. My DH enjoyed the flavor. My opinion? Eh. It’s not the preparation I didn’t like; it’s the cut of meat. If you go onto epicurious for this recipe, there are countless reviews of it. Some loved it. Others didn’t. Most people raved about the relish. I didn’t make the relish because I still had some mango-strawberry salsa I made the other night. But I think the cherry tomato relish would be a much better complement to the beef than the salsa. The marinade has a more savory taste, and a sweet salsa doesn’t go. It just doesn’t. But, no matter what, you can’t change the taste or the chew of the meat. So, knowing all that, you can decide whether you’d like to try this.

I don’t usually post recipes here that I don’t just love, but since I thought maybe other people would like the meat better than I did, I’m posting it anyway.
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From my notes about this, it came from an ad I read in a magazine in 2002. Most likely an ad for Jell-o products since the pudding mix features in a major way in this dessert.

Searching through my recipes for something I could make at home and transport easily, I flagged about four recipes and this one won out because it just sounded good to me. My favorite go-to recipe for transporting is my German Chocolate Chip Cake I wrote up last year. Perfect for a picnic, camping, or any big gathering. But last weekend was our son’s birthday and his request was for German chocolate layer cake. He’s likely been eating leftovers of that all week. So I didn’t want to make that cake since it’s so similar. Therefore, this brownie pudding pie was the ticket.

It’s extremely easy to make. You do have to make a batter for the brownies, but it’s an easy one. Once baked and cooled, you make instant pudding to layer on top of that, and top with a thick layer of Cool-Whip (or real whipped cream if you’d prefer). If you want to be fancy, shave a bit of chocolate on the top for decoration. The cake doesn’t need anything else (like ice cream) because it’s already very moist with the pudding layer. Perfect for just slicing and serving on paper plates with plastic utensils. What’s interesting is: although you use an instant pudding mix, and Cool-Whip, for goodness’ sake, when you combine it all, you don’t realize you’re eating fake whipped cream and instant pudding. Somehow, the combination, or the zing of chocolate fools you to think you’re eating real whipped cream (would I kid you about this?) and you don’t exactly know there’s a pudding layer. It tastes kind of like mousse. Nobody has to know you didn’t slave on this – it looks like you did.

Because my DH is diabetic, I did substitute some Splenda for sugar in the brownie part, and I used sugar-free pudding so he could have some of this. But you can use whatever suits your fancy. It’s just the combo of the brownies, pudding and whipped cream that kind of just melt in your mouth. Not super gourmet by any means. Easy? Yes. Tasty too.
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I remember, back in the mid-1990s, when chicken chili arrived on the food scene. We were in the thick of trying to revamp our old favorites (mostly with beef, veal, even lamb) into more healthy versions featuring chicken (ground or cubes) or turkey. The first time I made turkey meatloaf let’s just say that I was under-whelmed. But many creative cooks have figured out ways to give ground chicken and ground turkey a lot more flavor, yet look like those old beef favorites. For awhile I tried mixing half chicken/turkey and half beef in things like meatloaf. Then I got fed up with the lack of texture and flavor and went back to all beef versions. We just didn’t eat them very often.

But chicken chili is an altogether different animal, so to speak. It’s really not exactly chili. At least this one is almost more like a thick soup or stew, but with all the trappings of chili. This has all the stuff we like – beans, meat protein (chicken instead of beef), chiles, chili powder, cumin, then you serve it with all the usual garnishes (in this case: sour cream, grated cheese, cilantro and salsa). I even added a bowl of crumbled-up Fritos to the chili garnishes to add some crunch. There is more than an average amount of butter in this dish. I used what was called for, but wonder if it would taste just as good with less. As our friend Bud says, fat is the sled on which flavor rides. Maybe because there are so many sort-of bland things in this, the butter becomes a necessity. Next time I will try it with less. I also think this will serve more people than the recipe indicated. Although, the crew eating this were all very hungry from a hard day’s work (see below).

The recipe was in the February, 1996 issue of Gourmet magazine. It’s from “The Kitchen for Exploring Foods,” (a catering company) in Pasadena, right in our neck of the woods. You can find the recipe on epicurious.com easily enough, and read the 186 reviews (the 10-12 I read all raved about it). If you have made any of my recipes, just trust me on this. The chili is gosh-darned good. I made a double batch (I was feeding a crowd) so purchased 3 very large, whole chicken breasts, bone and skin attached, roasted them in the oven (400 for 35 minutes), then cut off the meat and into small chunks. The chicken does NOT get simmered in the chili for any length of time – you don’t want the chicken to give up its flavor and moisture to the soup, so add at the last minute and just heat through.

Our son and his wife were moving back into their house a few days ago (it’s been about 13 months for the major remodel to be completed). My DH was there to check off the boxes and furniture as the movers brought them in the door. I offered to bring a meal for the family helping – Karen chose dinner. But, the caveat was they have no cooktop or oven yet (the wrong one was delivered, and now they must wait another week or two for the right one to arrive) so I had to bring dinner in a crock pot or something else that could be plugged in. Chili seemed like the easy choice. Basically a one dish meal with a salad and dessert. See cook’s notes at the bottom of the recipe for more details. My changes are marked in RED.
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Files: MasterCook 5+ and MasterCook 14 (click links to open in MC; 14 contains photo)

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Wow, is that not a gorgeous photo? If I do say so myself. Must be the colors, the mango, and the strawberry against the black bowl!

Sometimes recipes bear repeating. And sometimes when you change a part of a recipe it makes it different enough that you, my readers, need to know about it. Originally this recipe was for pineapple salsa, but one time years ago I didn’t have pineapple, and I did have mango, so made it that way instead. It was the same recipe, just different fruit.

The Pineapple Salsa was posted last year. However, I didn’t have a photo because that was just after I’d fractured my foot. Now we’ve got a photo, at least of this version! The other night I had some super thick pork chops from Niman Ranch (ordered online, and on sale some months ago). I brined them for a couple of hours, DH grilled them with our tried and true method (mark them over direct fire, then off to the side, reduced heat, until they reached 150 in the center) and served this salsa on the side. I didn’t have red bell pepper, so substituted strawberries. Delish.

If you click on this link for the Pineapple Salsa, just substitute mango and strawberry for the pineapple and red bell pepper.
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If you happen to need an absolute fast (and a bit flashy) but easy topping for broccoli, you’ve come to the right place. It’s so simple and easy, I’m almost embarrassed to tell you about it. Use this when you want that mound of broccoli to have a bit more flair than it does, just sitting there on a plate.

This little sauce or topping is nothing more than a mixture of bottled mayo and good mustard. The only no-no is you can’t use hot dog mustard. No, you can’t. But either the French stuff (I use Maille mostly), or any kind of Dijon. Even flavored mustards work too except sweetened mustards.

Mix up a bit of mayo, maybe 1/4 cup for 3-4 people, or up to 1/2 cup if you’re serving 5-6 people, and spoon in one or two tablespoons of mustard. Mix up, then TASTE IT. It should have a pronounced mustard taste. Add pepper if you’d like, but it’s fine as is. If you’re hesitant because of the guesswork in this, dip a tiny bite of broccoli in the sauce to try it, then decide if it needs more mayo or more mustard. Put a large dollop of it on top of your just steamed broccoli. Kids love it. Adults love it too. I don’t even use a recipe – it’s just the mayo and mustard to your proportions.

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